A crow swooped from on high to the dusty grass, a cricket spied, a lure
to the meal of dusk.  But though the crow had devoured no shortage of
crickets in her time, never before this deep twilight had she heard their song.
This particular cricket was a songster, weaving the moonlight
dissolving the spectra of the dying sun into strange
insectoid melancholic stridulation.
Sensing a predator, the cricket ceased its chirp and sunk to hide
in blades of grass. But the crow marked the insect with her keen
eyes.

"Don't stop," said the crow, "I want to hear your song."

Dual shivering waves shook the cricket's antennae in acute warning.
He knew that to do any other than to scamper, desprately, towards the
dense underbrush would forego any shield against being eaten. But
in the crow's voice he heard longing and love of his music he had
never before felt.

Standing more erect, forsaking obfuscation, the cricket ran the comb
of one wing against the other, filling the night with a quiet strange
song he never before had sung.  Serene the crow stood, her mind in
flight in a realm of dreams and music where wings had never taken her.

The crow and the cricket fell in love.  Taking the tiny cricket in her
wing and putting him on her back, she flew into the depths of indigo
striated by lunar halos.  The night wind folded them both in a chilled
caress, the cricket seeing the world from heights he had never before
imagined. And when they stopped to sleep, the cricket opened his wing,
which never before he had, and the crow slipped one blue-black feather
under it which the cricket closed over in embrace.